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Remembering Dave Walter

Montana: The Magazine of Western History, Autumn 2006

Historians across Montana join friends, family members, and colleagues in mourning the death of the Montana Historical Society's longtime research historian Dave Walter on July 19, at age sixty-three. Walter joined the historical society in 1979 and served as its research historian. He was the author or editor of hundreds of articles and a dozen books; he took pride in his work on Montana's World War II conscientious objector camps, the state's World War I Councils of Defense, the 19305 KKK movement, and Jeannette Rankin.

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The breadth and importance of Dave's work are reflected in the awards he received: an honorary doctorate of humane letters from the University of Montana in 1994; the Governor's Humanities Award in 1998; the H. G. Merriam Award for contributions to Montana literature in 2001; and die Montana Historical Society Educator's Award in 2003.

Dave's indelible presence in my pages begins in my diary. In June of 1982, my wife Carol and I alit at the historical society to do research on 1930s Montana for my novel English Creek. Behind the library desk sat a man with a chest like a boulder and pleasant eyes and an uncanny intuition for what a researcher was actually after, however ill denned, or, in my case, downright novelistic, that researcher's quest might be. After two days of what I recorded as Dave's "swift, shrewd help," we walked out with 305 pages of photocopied material.

Our professional acquaintanceship rapidly rocketed off into such a friendship that Dave and his wife Marcella always merrily provided Carol and me a roof over our heads whenever we were in Helena, fed us and regaled us, laughed into the night with us on starlit summer evenings in their backyard. Dave was a friend I fondly thought of as a kind of fjord-a person of deep privacies, where tides both serious and playful flowed, and, of course, a person shaped intrinsically by his man-made glacier of research.

Book after book, the magic Dave lent me by answering an almost infinite number of research questions lay in his genius-like sense of what was tucked away-what an obscure volume or stray collection of papers might have in its "hip pocket." He loved Montana and its stories, its follies and its glories, and he knew the state and its history in a way probably none of the rest of us ever can. Nor will his exact keen glint of eye toward Montana and Montanans ever be duplicated. You didn't have to be around Dave many minutes to realize that he not only had his wits about him, he had the blessed singular of that, wit. When he sent me some priceless nugget of research practically by return mail, he warned me severely: "Don't let word get around that you received a response from us this quickly, as it will give us a lousy reputation. It is our policy to answer this quickly-it just isn't our practice."

Ultimately Dave figured so large in the contents of my pages that I simply put him there. He was, I believe, the only living person I ever enlisted in my fiction, and inevitably, in his scene in Ride with Me, Mariah Montana he is at work in the historical society library, where he compassionately helps Jick McCaskill with a vital piece of family research.

And one more time beyond that I was able to take delight in bringing Dave Walter openly onto the page, this time way up at the front of the book. It felt only right to try to repay, a bit, Dave's immense dedication to the historical milieu of my books by putting him on the dedication page of 'Prairie Nocturne. That page carries these words: "To Dave and Marcellafor doing half the laughing and damn near all the history."

Ivan Doig

Seattle, Washington

I have known David since he attended the first class that I taught at the University of Montana. That was in the fall of 1965. David had come west fresh from an undergraduate education at Wesleyan University. He was planning on pursuing a graduate degree in English under the direction of the nationally known critic Leslie Fiedler. Unfortunately, or fortunately, Fiedler was headed east just as David was coming west. Deprived of direction in the English department, David drifted down the hall to history. There he discovered one of his lifelong loves: Montana history. He also discovered K. Ross Toole, who had come to the university that same year.

For the ten years following 1965, David served the university's history department, K. Ross Toole, and literally hundreds of Montana students. He taught, he researched, he prepared numerous studies for Ross, and, on one occasion, he applied his considerable skills to teaching my graduate students how to write. His efforts during that one quarter determined that I had little to do in the succeeding six quarters.

David befriended students-both undergraduate and graduate-and a large number of both owe their degrees to his interest and aid. He brought an intense professional questioning to seminars and elevated the quality of each one simply by being there. He recognized those elements of graduate work that were sham, but he also recognized and appreciated those aspects that were valuable and productive.

Remembering Dave Walter

Montana: The Magazine of Western History, Autumn 2006

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